As a matter of fact, however, the application of force had already begun. On March 21 Ludendorff had opened his great offensive in France which was to bring the war to a German victory, and for the next few months Foch, and not Wilson, was the dominant personality among the Allies. And for a time it seemed that however much America had contributed to the moral struggle between the alliances, she would be able to furnish comparatively little force. The winter of 1917-18 had been full of humiliations. The railroad disorganization which had led to the proclamation of Government control at the end of December was being cleared up only slowly. The Fuel Administration was in an even worse tangle, and in January business and industry had to shut down for several days throughout the whole Eastern part of the country in order to find coal to move food trains to the ports. Great sums of money and enormous volumes of boasting had been expended on airplane construction without getting any airplanes. Hundreds of millions had been poured into shipyards and ships were only beginning to come from the ways. The richest nation in the world allowed hundreds of its soldiers to die in cantonment hospitals because of insufficient attention and inadequate supplies. Artillery regiments were being trained with wooden guns and only 150,000 Americans, many of them technical troops, were in France. The Secretary of War, called before a Congressional committee to answer questions on these shortcomings, had created the impression that he either did not know that anything was wrong or did not care. On Jan. 19 Senator Chamberlain, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs, declared that "the military establishment of the United States has broken down; it has almost stopped functioning," and that there was "inefficiency in every bureau and department of the Government." The next day he introduced bills for a War Cabinet and a Director of Munitions, which would practically have taken the military and industrial conduct of the war out of the President's hands. The President met the challenge boldly with the declaration that Senator Chamberlain's statement was "an astonishing and unjustifiable distortion of the truth," and must have been due to disloyalty to the Administration. Chamberlain's reply, while admitting that he might have overstated his case, was a proclamation of loyalty to his Commander-in-Chief and an appeal for getting down to the business of winning the war. _The Fourteen Points_ _President Wilson's program for the world's peace was outlined in the Fourteen Points, which constituted part of an address delivered before Congress January 8, 1918, as follows:_ _No Private Understandings_ 1 OPEN COVENANTS of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind, but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view. _Freedom of the Seas_